Henry Vi, Parts I, II and III

Part One Introduction Throughout much of the fifteenth century, England had suffered the ravages of civil war. From the long struggles between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists, the so-called Wars of the Roses, the country had emerged in 1485 shaken but united at last under the strong rule of the Tudors. To Elizabethans, this period of civil war was still a recent event that had tested and almost destroyed England's nationhood. They were, moreover, still troubled by political and dynastic uncertainties of their own. Queen Elizabeth, granddaughter of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, was unmarried and aging, and her successor unchosen. Her Catholic enemies at home and abroad plotted a return to the ancient faith renounced by Henry VIII in his reformation of the church. Spain had attempted an invasion of England with the great Armada in 1588, perhaps two years before Shakespeare began writing his Henry VI plays. It was in such an era of crisis and patriotic excitement that the Henry VI plays first appeared. Indeed, they helped to establish the vogue of the English history play, which was to flourish throughout the 1590s. England's civil wars could be studied and analyzed now, from a perspective of over one hundred years later, and perhaps could provide a key to the present time. At hand was a new edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, 1587, along with the earlier chronicle writings of Robert Fabyan, John Stow, and Richard Grafton, as well as Edward Hall's Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Families of Lancaster and York, John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of Martyrs, and A Mirror for Magistrates. How had these wars begun? Elizabethans searched for an answer, not in economic or social terms, but in religious and moral ones. According to a traditional and government-sponsored explanation, reflected to a large extent (though with many contradictions) in the chronicles of Edward Hall, and familiar to Shakespeare whether he agreed with it or not, the Wars of the Roses were a manifestation of God's wrath, a divine punishment inflicted on the English people for their wayward behavior. The people and their rulers had brought civil war on themselves by self-serving ambition, arrogance, and disloyalty. King Henry VI's grandfather, Henry IV, had come to the throne in 1399 by deposing and then executing his own cousin, Richard II (a momentous event, to be portrayed by Shakespeare in a later history play). Henry VI was himself an infant when he succeeded to the throne in 1422, owing to the untimely death of his father, Henry V. Too young at first to rule and never blessed with his father's ability to act decisively, Henry VI was utterly unable to halt the struggle for power that developed among members of his large and discordant family. Ultimately, his very title to the throne was challenged by his kinsman Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, who claimed to be rightful king by virtue of his descent from Henry IV's uncle Lionel, Duke of Clarence. The Yorkist faction marched to battle against Henry VI's Lancastrian faction (so named because for gen- erations the family had been possessors of the dukedom of Lancaster), and the war was on. The providential view of these events was never wholly endorsed by the chroniclers and certainly not by Shakespeare. Edward Hall's overall scheme is undeniably providential, and yet, as a historian, he presents a multiplicity of detail that cumulatively raises difficult issues of interpretation. At the same time, the providential view made good propaganda for the Tudor regime, and as such it gave widespread currency to the theory of God's anger toward a rebellious people. The outcome of the war seemed to confirm this pattern: universal devastation and the deaths of those most responsible for the conflict led eventually, according to the theory, to appeasementShakespeare, William is the author of 'Henry Vi, Parts I, II and III', published 1988 under ISBN 9780553212853 and ISBN 0553212850.